History

One of the burdens of my work as a historian of Japanese Americans is the continuing sense of time passing. I have a continuing need to find people before they move out of reach, due to death or disability. Now, I realize that, on one level, I have less ground for complaint than most. After […]

Clarke Hiroshi Kawakami, a man who made his mark in many different fields, was born in Momence, Ill. in 1909. His mother was Mildred Clarke, a white American, and his father was the well-known Issei author and journalist Kiyoshi Karl Kawakami. Kiyoshi Kawakami was born in Yonezawa, Japan in the 1870s (most early sources claim […]

「廣島縣安佐郡川內村町溫井ミヤモト 四十五年」 “Miyamoto Nukui Community, Kawauchi Village, Asa District, Hiroshima Prefecture 45th Year” The characters above are carved on a wall on the second floor of the former Angel Island immigration station. On Aug. 7, a group of 16 descendants of Masaru Miyamoto gathered on Angel Island with San Francisco State University Professor Charles Egan to […]

Editor’s Note: This is the second of a two-part series. As the Pacific War drew to a close, the War of Independence broke out in Indonesia. Javanese sailors working on British and Dutch ships, who faced deportation once the war ended, became fearful that they would be sent back on the ships to carry arms […]

The Oct. 4, 2014 Nikkei Angel Island Pilgrimage — presented by the Nichi Bei Foundation in partnership with the Angel Island Immigration Station Foundation and National Japanese American Historical Society — sparked a lot of interest among Japanese Americans in their potential Angel Island roots, either immigrant ancestors or those who may have been briefly […]

Editor’s Note: This is the fourth and final part of an ongoing series. Monika Kehoe’s wartime position as director of adult education at the Gila River War Relocation Authority concentration camp led to a postwar career that took her around the world, pursuing interests in multiple fields and working variously as instructor, athletics coach, administrator, […]

Editor’s Note: This is the second part of an ongoing series. Monika Kehoe’s experience with Japanese Americans served as a foundation for her later career, which involved working as an administrator and teaching English to diverse international populations (a point that will be discussed in depth later on). As she noted in the introduction to […]

Editor’s Note: This is the first part in an ongoing series. Ever since I began writing “The Great Unknown” in 2007, I have had the pleasure of contributing an annual queer heritage column, which explores the nature of sexuality and the experience of lesbians and gays in Japanese American history. This year’s installment recounts the […]

This is the second half of a two-part series on the Hirose family, a pair of exceptional hapa brothers who grew up in New York at the turn of the 20th century. While older brother George Hirose (see the Nov. 7, 2013 issue of the Nichi Bei Weekly), as mentioned, became a clerk at a […]

Throughout much of the 20th century, a unique feature of the West Coast Nikkei community press was the New Year’s supplement. These special holiday issues contained several additional pages in both English and Japanese. Most of the contents, at least in the English sections, were made up of advertisements from local businesses and columns of […]